John O. Killens created the
Black
Writer’s Conference (which has been hosted every few years at Medgar Evers College
since 1986), was a Medgar Evers College professor and one of the most respected authors of
his time. He died of cancer on October 27, 1987. He was 71 at the time of his
death and lived in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York

John Oliver Killens' large, multilayered, debut
novel, Youngblood, was published in May 1954, the same month
that the Supreme Court ruled in the case of Brown v. Board of
Education. As we note the 50th anniversary of that landmark act
of jurisprudence, compelling reasons exist to remember and to
celebrate Killens as one of our most important cultural figures.

Taken as a whole, the fiction of John Oliver
Killens anticipates the drama of playwright August Wilson, who
is approaching the conclusion of a cycle of 10 plays, each
designed to illustrate African American life in one of the
decades of the 20th century. Similarly, most of Killens's major
works connect to a particular era and set of concerns in African
American history. Unfortunately, most of his books are out of
print. Great Gittin' Up Morning (1980) explores the antebellum
period through the eyes of a fictionalized Denmark Vesey and his
partners in a slave rebellion that occurred in South Carolina in
1822. (The story is geared primarily toward younger readers, but
it packs a punch comparable to Black Thunder, Arna Bontemps's
excellent 1936 novel about the Gabriel Prosser insurrection.)
Killens's last published novel, Great Black Russian, imagines
the life of Alexander Pushkin, who was a contemporary of Vesey
on the world scene, but the crucial action and drama in the
novel unfold in the decade or so following Vesey's death. A Man
Ain't Nothin' but a Man, spun around the legend of John Henry,
examines the struggle of African Americans--and the working
class overall--in the 19th century, post Emancipation era.

Youngblood (1954) is a book about struggle on
lira Crow terrain toward black self-determination and economic
justice over the first third of the 20th century. And Then We
Heard the Thunder (1963) is easily the best treatment we have in
fiction of the African American military experience during World
War II. 'Sippi (1967) dramatically chronicles developments from
the onset of the modern Civil Rights Movement to the dawn of the
Black Power Era. The Cotillion; or One Good Bull Is Half the
Herd ((1971) depicts cultural politics in the post-Malcolm
period before 1970. In addition to his novels, Killens wrote
numerous short stories, plays and scripts; he was the first
African American to receive solo screenplay credit for a
Hollywood movie, the 1959 Odds Against Tomorrow.

Killens articulated African American heroism,
particularly within a family or community context, and offered a
set of values he felt was liberating. Black nationalism is
always a feature of his work; the community-oriented activism
and armed self defense in some of his portrayals make this
clear. But ever present is transformation.

In 1950, Killens became the founding chairman of
the Harlem Writers Guild, a still-active workshop whose members
have authored hundreds of books and sponsored numerous
activities to promote African American literature. A couple of
years later, he and close friend
John Henrik Clarke assisted
Malcolm X with the founding of
the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

Although Killens remained involved with various
political efforts into the 1980s'the FBI kept a file on him for
five decades'he devoted an increasing amount of time to his work
as an educator and cultural organizer. He held appointments at
the New School for Social Research, Fisk University, Columbia
University, Howard University, Bronx Community College and
Medgar Evers College in his home borough of Brooklyn. He
generally insisted on running a writing workshop for the
community in addition to his responsibilities to the students
enrolled on campus.

Despite the great demand upon his time, Killens,
naturally gregarious, loved to draw artists and intellectuals
around him for discussions about literature and politics. In
conjunction with his teaching appointments, he directed a series
of writers' conferences between 1965 and 1986 that serve as
milestones in African American literary history. That tradition
continues with the biennial National Black Writers Conference at
Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, which this year presented a
tribute and symposium to Killens.

Killens was unwavering in his love for black
people. We should continue to return that love with our
remembrance.

Black intellectuals have long considered the great Russian
poet Alexander Pushkin to be one of their own. Disturbed that recent
academic works have either ignored or downplayed Pushkin's African heritage
(his great-grandfather was an Abyssinian prince at the court of Peter the
Great), the late Killens ( And Then They Heard the Thunder ) sought to
remedy this omission with a "fictionalized" biography.

The result is a somewhat racy, streamlined novelization of
Pushkin's life. Killens contends that Pushkin considered himself to be
African and that his liberal stance concerning the social issues of his day,
and involvement with ill-fated radical groups such as the Decembrists,
stemmed from his complicated feelings about his black heritage. Pushkin,
according to Killens, was affected by his ancestry in other ways as well.
His well-documented rejection by his parents, principally his mother, was
due to his "African looks," and his prowess with women was attributable to
his "hot African blood." Eschewing any kind of analysis of Pushkin's work,
Killens focuses instead on the dramatic events in his life, culminating with
Pushkin's tragic early death from wounds suffered in a duel. However
lovingly conceived, the author's last work is a rather strident polemic, and
suffers accordingly. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the
Publisher
John Oliver Killens's landmark novel of social protest
chronicles the lives of the Youngblood family and their friends in Crossroads,
Georgia, from the turn of the century to the Great Depression. Its large cast of
powerfully affecting characters includes Joe Youngblood, a tragic figure of
heroic physical strength; Laurie Lee, his beautiful and strong-willed wife;
Richard Myles, a young high school teacher from New York; and Robby, the
Youngbloods' son, who takes the large risk of becoming involved in the labor
movement.

Book Review
I first came across this book a number of years ago through Quarterly Black Review when on
their website was a category titled, "Books Every African-American Library Should
Have" (its not there anymore). Before then, I had never heard of John O.
Killens or And Then We Heard Thunder. I then came across a copy of it and set it aside for
a long time. How stupid of me. The novel is wonderful. And Then We Heard Thunder is about
Sol Sauders, a recently married, young black man in the early 1940s during World War II.
The novel is of his encounters, the people he meets and of racism in the United States
Army. An epic novel not to be forgotten.-Thumper, AALBC.com

John Oliver Killens's politically charged
novels And Then We Heard the Thunder and The Cotillion; or One
Good Bull Is Half the Herd, were nominated for the Pulitzer
Prize. His works of fiction and nonfiction, the most famous of
which is his novel Youngblood, have been translated into more
than a dozen languages. An influential novelist, essayist,
screenwriter, and teacher, he was the founding chair of the
Harlem Writers Guild and mentored a generation of black writers
at Fisk, Howard, Columbia, and elsewhere. Killens is recognized
as the spiritual father of the Black Arts Movement. In this
first major biography of Killens, Keith Gilyard examines the
life and career of the man who was perhaps the premier African
American writer-activist from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Gilyard extends his focus to the broad boundaries of Killens's
times and literary achievement'from the Old Left to the Black
Arts Movement and beyond. Figuring prominently in these pages
are the many important African American artists and political
figures connected to the author from the 1930s to the 1980s'W.
E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Alphaeus Hunton,
Langston Hughes,
James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr.,
Malcolm X, Harry
Belafonte, and Maya Angelou, among others.